Page 1 of Sentinel of Talon Mountain
PROLOGUE
WREN
Five Years Earlier
The snow swallowed my scream. It tore from my throat, raw and desperate, but the icy wind stole it away before it could carry. The heavy hush of falling snow smothered it completely, as if the mountain refused to bear witness. I’d trained for avalanches, studied flow patterns, practiced dig-outs until my arms went numb—but nothing prepares you for the moment the mountain decides who lives and who doesn’t.
I clawed through the whiteout, lungs burning, fingers numb inside soaked gloves. My heartbeat slammed in my ears, a metallic tang of fear on my tongue. Wind sliced like a blade across the narrow strip of exposed skin between my goggles and hood.
I couldn’t see more than a few feet, but I knew exactly where he’d gone under. One second, Mason had been tethered right behind me.
“You still with me?” he had shouted minutes earlier, his voice muffled by the storm.
The next, the mountain cracked open and swallowed him whole. The rope between us snapped taut, then went slack with a sickening whip, the sudden emptiness hitting my chest like a hammer blow. My knees threatened to buckle, nausea rolling through me as I fought to dig toward where the tether vanished.
“Mason!” I had yelled into the whiteout, my voice breaking.
For a second, I thought I heard him call back. Thought I saw his hand just beyond the drift. But it was only the wind playing tricks, and snow moving where it shouldn't.
The rescue took hours. Recovery took days. What followed demanded something deeper. Something that never appeared in the reports. Guilt settled into my bones and refused to let go. I carried it like a weighted shroud, tight, unyielding, and impossible to cast off. Even in sleep, I felt the snap of the rope, heard the thunder of breaking snow, saw Mason vanish into a blur of white I could never reach in time.
The incident review cleared me. Unavoidable avalanche, they said. No error. No fault. Mason’s wife didn’t see it that way. The first message arrived a week later—seven words, cold as ice, each one cutting deeper than the last.
You were supposed to bring him home.
The words might as well have been a knife to the ribs—short, brutal, and impossible to ignore. I could almost hear the venom in her voice as if the message had been spoken aloud instead of typed on a screen.
The messages started cold. Then biting. Then personal. Harassment, but subtle enough to avoid legal traction. I could’ve fought back. Filed charges. More than once I typed a reply, hands trembling with fury—I did everything I could—only to delete it letter by letter until the screen was blank again.
I didn’t want a war. I wanted to disappear. Because no matter how many people said it wasn’t my fault, I knew better. I was the one holding the rope.
I didn’t tell my older brother Caleb. Didn’t tell anyone. I resigned from Denali Search and Rescue, sold most of what I owned, and bought a remote cabin in Talon Mountain—sight unseen, five miles outside Glacier Hollow. Each mile I drove away from civilization felt like peeling away a layer of skin I no longer needed. No neighbors. No expectations. No noise.
The drive south from Denali felt endless, the horizon stretching wide and empty under a winter sky the color of steel. Snow-crusted pines flanked the narrow highway, their shadows slipping over my windshield in long, silent fingers.
With each passing mile marker, I left more of my old life behind: my team, my reputation, the constant reminders of failure. The heater rattled against the cold, my duffel and a box of mismatched dishes sliding in the back seat. I passed no one for hours, only the occasional raven lifting off the road as my tires pressed through fresh drifts.
When the mountain range that contained Talon Mountain finally rose on the horizon, jagged and unyielding, something in my chest loosened. Locals called it beautiful but merciless, a place that chewed up the careless and kept its secrets under ice.
Even its name carried weight in Alaska—spoken with reverence in survival circles, fear in backwoods bars. People whispered that it didn’t just test your limits; it found your weaknesses and exposed them to the wind.
Caleb’s voice echoed in my memory: ‘That place will eat you alive, Wren.’It wasn’t hope I felt. Not yet. But it was distance, and for now, that was enough.
The first time I stepped inside, the roof was leaking, the water heater groaned, and the whole place smelled like wet dust and pine rot. Caleb would’ve had opinions—none of them good. I was done explaining myself.
I dropped my pack on the dusty floor, leaned against the door, and let the silence wrap around me like armor. The woodcreaked softly in the cold, my breath fogged in the dim light, and for the first time in years, the silence felt like safety. Silence didn’t argue, didn’t accuse. It didn’t ask me to explain myself. It just let me be.
It may not have been much, but it was home.
NATE
Anchorage, Alaska
Present Day
“I guess this is it,” I say, setting my badge on the captain’s desk. It lands with a soft clink that feels louder than it should.
He leans back in his chair, eyes narrowing as if weighing my resolve. “You sure about this, Barrett? Ten more years and you could retire from the city.”
